Really Fucked Computer

A series of accidential drops led to this tale of smartphone “fun”.  My wife’s Palm Centro was finished - its screen cracked and no longer responsive to even the firmest touch.  Wanting to avoid Sprint’s bait and switch cheap phone upgrade offer (with the mandatory 2-year contract extension) we accepted a friend’s offer for a free BlackBerry Curve (an extra from work).  How can anyone say no to a free new gadget?

(Side note: around the same time my daughter sent her Palm Centro flying from her pocket, into a stream and (despite trying the trick of drying it out in rice for a few days) off to smartphone heaven.  I avoided Sprint lock-in in my daughter’s case by purchasing a brand new Palm Centro on eBay for $100 with stern warnings of “three strikes you are back to landline – pronto”.  The warning because this was the second time my daughter’s cellphone met a watery death, the first being drowning by washing machine.)

Given Palm’s decent into madness (perhaps slowed by the well received Pre) it seemed good fortune to have a non-Palm device fall into our laps.  And I have a solid opinion of Research in Motion (aka RIM, aka the Canadian company behind the Blackberry), having been a multi-year BlackBerry fan prior to leaping to Palm.

So why does this seemly positive outcome have a place on ReallyFuckedComputer.com? For a simple reason – the upgrade from the Palm Centro to the BlackBerry Curve was painful.  Painful.  Full of completely avoidable technology pain.  Given how lucrative stealing Palm customers must be you’d think RIM would do a better job at stealing them – by making the migration / upgrade path simple and effortless.  You’d be wrong. And given the flood of consumers entering the smartphone market you’d also think RIM would make the BlackBerry work effectively with Windows Mail (in our case – on Windows Vista) / Outlook Express (for Windows XP users – effectively the same thing).  You’d be wrong.  In fact, you’d be fucked.

First on the migration – there is simple no one click, simple wizard path to getting all of your Palm data (contacts / calendar / notes) migrated to the BlackBerry.  You have to export contacts from Palm and then import the contacts into Windows Mail and then sync.  And that ultimately didn’t work effectively because the BlackBerry support for Windows Mail is so poor.  I’m sure there are software packages out there that assist with the migration – but why (RIM if you are reading) isn’t this very simple migration problem handled by RIM?

After a combination of export / import / manual edits Windows Mail had the key Palm data and here is the next series of glitches.  When Windows Mail  syncs contacts with the BlackBerry the street part of the address is not synched.  What the f-?  Despite all efforts to wrestle the sync to work it was clear from Google searches and a call to the computer support service I subscribe to that the problem lies with RIM’s lame support of Windows Mail.  The average consumer with the average consumer version of Microsoft Office (home / student edition) loses – again.

I was in too deep now to bail – to buy another Palm device to relieve my smartphone migration suffering.  There was no alternative but to install the full version of Outlook 2007.  Now round 3 proceeds – this simpler but still messy.  With Outlook 2007 in place I used the Outlook migration wizard to pull in all the Windows Mail data – which, because the BlackBerry was still syncing, resulted in a bunch of duplicate emails and for reasons I haven’t bothered to determine, numerous deleted emails became undeleted.  I pulled some clever config magic to avoid duplicating all Contacts (technical deep dive – I temporarily made the sync one-way – from Outlook 2007 to the BlackBerry – and only after the first sync did I then make it a two-way sync).

Now we come to the end of this tale of woe – like most technology problems you end up ok in the end but having been fucked along the way you aren’t sure if you are better of than when you started.

To summarize:

• BlackBerry and Windows Mail / Outlook Express doesn’t work – maybe someday RIM will get their act together for consumer users but that day has yet to come
• Windows Mail / Outlook Express is more than a poor cousin to the full Outlook application – it’s the poor cousin missing teeth after being home schooled with a baseball bat
• Migrating from any Palm device to a BlackBerry device is extremely painful and time-consuming – at least it was for us (if you have a faster path please – please – comment for others to benefit)